The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus and an image forming method.
Heretofore, there has been known an image forming apparatus dealing with a sheet having a tab. Such an image forming apparatus, specifically for example, is equipped with a sensor to discriminate between a document with tab and a normal document in Japanese Patent Publication Laid-Open No. HEI 9-258615. Thus, the cost of the image forming apparatus was disadvantageously increased due to the sensor equipped.
In order to cope with the above problem, for example, there has been proposed an image forming apparatus capable of handling a sheet having a tab without being equipped with the sensor by causing a document with a tab and a bundle of normal documents to be read separately in Japanese Patent Publication Laid-Open No. 2002-359720.
However, the above image forming apparatus as described in Japanese Patent Publication Laid-Open No. 2002-359720 cannot take advantage of a document conveyance mechanism provided in the image forming apparatus. More particularly, the apparatus cannot read at once the document with tab and a bundle of the normal documents sequentially in order of the documents, for example, first reading image data from the document with tab which has been set in the document conveyance mechanism, followed by reading image data from the normal document bundle which has been set in the document conveyance mechanism. Thus, there is a problem that work and time are required to sort the sheets with images formed thereon and thereby the image forming cannot be effectively carried out.